The Secretary-General of the Arab League, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, called for the need to develop a comprehensive strategy for Arab national security to face regional challenges and the changing global situation with all its risks.
In his speech at the National Defense College in the Sultanate of Oman on Wednesday, Aboul Gheit said that the fulcrum of this strategy is to strengthen the Arab national states, especially those countries facing crises and need an Arab backer to restore stability and contribute to the establishment of the required political settlements and ward off the risks of destructive regional and external interventions.
He added that the quest to strengthen the Arab national state goes beyond supporting crisis countries, to the need for joint action to address pressing threats facing many Arab countries. This includes food security, which remains one of the most serious threats to social stability in the coming period.
He pointed out that the Arab countries have paid attention to this matter and its seriousness and adopted during the recent Algiers summit a strategy to achieve Arab food security.
“What we are facing today at the global level is not one crisis, not even several overlapping crises, but several ongoing or permanent crises, which some have described using the term Permacrisis,” he said.
This means that the crisis does not become an emergency event that is being overcome, but is a continuous reality that must be lived with and dealt with its consequences, he added.
Aboul Gheit pointed out that the world has been through serious economic crises before, such as the global crisis in 2008 and 2009, and geopolitical crises that threaten security and stability, such as the war on terrorism.
“But this is the first time in many decades that almost the whole world has suffered from several successive overlapping crises, whether in terms of health, climate, the global economy or security,” he noted.
The Secretary-General added that the most dangerous is that these crises are not expected to have a quick solution or an urgent way out, but rather their main feature is continuity for long periods, with extended and profound consequences.
Aboul Gheit touched on the continuation of the Ukrainian crisis and the possibility of increasing its risks, adding that the Russian-Ukrainian war, which is entering its second year, is not a candidate for a near resolution from his point of view.
“The ceiling of Ukrainian and, in fact, Western demands is not acceptable to Moscow, and each side has a perception of the possibility of achieving a better situation through military action so that it improves its negotiating position when the guns are silenced and the parties sit down to the table for a political solution,” he said.
Aboul Gheit continued, “It is not difficult for us to imagine the terrible consequences of the transformation of the Ukrainian crisis into a protracted crisis, the parties are not only fighting militarily on the battlefield.”
“The battlefield is the wider world, whether through the weapon of economic sanctions, which are not paid for by Russia alone, not even the Europeans –who have suffered greatly from the adverse effects of sanctions–, but there are many peoples around the world who have suffered from the effects of inflation in energy and food prices due to the continuing crisis,” he added.
